“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect — you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
“I think Americans take their manners rather seriously,” said the elder Englishman.
“I guess so,” said Dick. “My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed — why, you Europeans haven’t carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century—”
“Not actually, perhaps—”
“Not actually. Not really.”
“Dick, you’ve always had such beautiful manners,” said Baby conciliatingly.
The women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger Englishman did not understand — he was one of the kind who were always jumping around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a ship — and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.
“So every time he hit you you considered him an even better friend?”
“I respected him more.”
“It’s the premise I don’t understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial matter—”
“If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you,” said the young Englishman coldly.
— This is what I’ll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.
He was ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.
The carnival spirit was strong and they went with the crowd into the grill, where a Tunisian barman manipulated the illumination in a counterpoint, whose other melody was the moon off the ice rink staring in the big windows. In that light, Dick found the girl devitalized, and uninteresting — he turned from her to enjoy the darkness, the cigarette points going green and silver when the lights shone red, the band of white that fell across the dancers as the door to the bar was opened and closed.
“Now tell me, Franz,” he demanded, “do you think after sitting up all night drinking beer, you can go back and convince your patients that you have any character? Don’t you think they’ll see you’re a gastropath?”
“I’m going to bed,” Nicole announced. Dick accompanied her to the door of the elevator.
“I’d come with you but I must show Franz that I’m not intended for a clinician.”
Nicole walked into the elevator.
“Baby has lots of common sense,” she said meditatively.
“Baby is one of—”
The door slashed shut — facing a mechanical hum, Dick finished the sentence in his mind, “ — Baby is a trivial, selfish woman.”
But two days later, sleighing to the station with Franz, Dick admitted that he thought favorably upon the matter.
“We’re beginning to turn in a circle,” he admitted. “Living on this scale, there’s an unavoidable series of strains, and Nicole doesn’t survive them. The pastoral quality down on the summer Riviera is all changing anyhow — next year they’ll have a Season.”
They passed the crisp green rinks where Wiener waltzes blared and the colors of many mountain schools flashed against the pale-blue skies.
“ — I hope we’ll be able to do it, Franz. There’s nobody I’d rather try it with than you—”
Good-by, Gstaad! Good-by, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!
XIV
Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff’s “Love of Three Oranges.” Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the half-ironic phrase: “Noncombatant’s shell-shock.”
As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.
Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her — she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain — for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole’s exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
He scrunched his pillow hard, lay down, and put the back of his neck against it as a Japanese does to slow the circulation, and slept again for a time. Later, while he shaved, Nicole awoke and marched around, giving abrupt, succinct orders to children and servants. Lanier came in to watch his father shave — living beside a psychiatric clinic he had developed an extraordinary confidence in and admiration for his father, together with an exaggerated indifference toward most other adults; the patients appeared to him either in their odd aspects, or else as devitalized, over-correct creatures without personality. He was a handsome, promising boy and Dick devoted much time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting officer and respectful enlisted man.
“Why,” Lanier asked, “do you always leave a little lather on the top of your hair when you shave?”
Cautiously Dick parted soapy lips: “I have never been able to find out. I’ve often wondered. I think it’s because I get the first finger soapy when I make the line of my sideburn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don’t know.”
“I’m going to watch it all tomorrow.”
“That’s your only question before breakfast?”
“I don’t really call it a question.”
“That’s one on you.”
Half an hour later Dick started up to the administration building. He was thirty-eight — still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him than he had worn upon the Riviera. For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic — certainly one of the best-appointed in Europe. Like Dohmler’s it was of the modern type — no longer a single dark